August 6, 2026

By Emilia Pasquier, CEO, Swissnex in San Francisco

What is it? What is it that makes San Francisco such a singular place in the world, constantly upended by technological and political revolutions, by booms and busts? Let me take you back to share what I’ve observed over the last four years, and why I’ve come to think of this city as one built by its own Cassandras, people who keep telling an inconvenient truth nobody wants to hear.

I was hired to lead Swissnex San Francisco in 2022. Before hopping on a plane to the edge of the world, I did a listening tour across Switzerland. I met with research institutions, the private sector, energetic founders, design schools, and other innovation agencies, and asked everyone the same question: what do you expect from Switzerland’s innovation outpost in San Francisco? Back in 2022, there was one tip that came again and again: focus on Austin, Texas, Los Angeles, or why not Arizona instead of San Francisco. Silicon Valley is over. This is what they told me and probably what they were reading in the news.

They had a point, on paper. San Francisco in 2022 was still recovering from Covid: empty offices, a high number of unhoused residents, a brutal fentanyl crisis. I’d also argue the city was hit twice by Covid: once by the shift to remote work, and once by the market correction and the resulting mass layoffs. The pandemic had given many users a good reason to upgrade their old tech or buy new services that were no longer necessary once in-person socialization became normal again. By early 2023, the industry had announced over 21,000 job cuts in the Bay Area alone, and the city found itself trapped in what people started calling the doom loop. The world was watching San Francisco, and not yet for AI.

And yet, something struck me throughout that first year. No one in San Francisco was worried about the city’s future. “That’s just how it is here,” people kept telling me. “It’ll come back. We’ve had the Gold Rush, the Dot Com boom, the social media frenzy. The hype always cycles back around.” In 2022, they sounded like a city of Cassandras: cursed to speak the truth about their own future and doomed not to be believed. Today, it turns out they’d simply read the room early.

Once I arrived I started asking Silicon Valley veterans directly: what is it? What makes this place so special, and how does it keep reinventing itself? I heard plenty of theories: that living on top of the San Andreas Fault keeps everyone perpetually on edge, that the pioneer spirit of the first settlers or of the long-haired hippies never left. I listened, and came away with three factors I believe actually explain the Bay Area’s staying power.

1. The Density — Ambition Per Square Mile

The first reason is the least romantic, and the most mathematical. What people call the Bay Area is a modest stretch of land. Compared to Switzerland, it is equivalent to the country’s three largest cantons, Graubünden, Valais, and Bern. Taken together, they are almost exactly the size of the entire Bay Area (18,040 km²). Yet the Bay Area packs in nearly double Switzerland’s population density, plus two of the best universities in the world in Stanford and UC Berkeley, and the founding or formative ground of Google, Tesla, Nvidia, OpenAI, Anthropic and others. In 2025 alone, Bay Area startups raised $152.5 billion in venture capital, nearly half of every VC dollar invested in the U.S. that year. That’s a concentration of talent, money, and research so dense that a coffee run or a kid’s birthday party can turn into a business opportunity. And because loyalty to any one company is thin here –– people jump ship the moment a better offer or a startup idea appears –– that density stays in constant motion, wiring the region’s industry, research, and capital together. One person I interviewed put it simply: everybody here is above average, and at the top of their game.

2. The Ethos — If We Can Build It, We Should

I like to call Silicon Valley a valley of engineers, not because most founders hold engineering degrees (plenty are college dropouts), but because the ethos is one of builders. The mindset isn’t “we should build this because it’s needed.” It’s “we should build this because we can.” New compute, smaller chips, an LLM that tells you who to date, palm-scan payments: if the possibility exists and you have the energy, you go for it. There’s a hunger for what’s possible that borders on fascination.

This is a world away from Switzerland, where we think long-term and dislike waste. If something isn’t needed, you probably shouldn’t build it; if you haven’t studied computer science, you probably shouldn’t build an app. There’s an earnestness to how we do business. Silicon Valley doesn’t share it. In here, trial, error, and a little playfulness are part of the game, and that’s fine.

That same optimism extends to the future itself, and it’s foreign to us Swiss. I heard this story from someone I recently spoke with: in the nineties, people believed the internet would end world hunger: “if you know who’s hungry, you can just ship them food.” Naive, in hindsight, given how we actually use the internet today. I won’t say one country’s attitude beats the other. But if you don’t believe you can do it, and you’re not surrounded by people who believe the same, the road is harder.

3. The Flywheel — Founders Funding Founders

Capital alone isn’t enough. Money needs the right structure around it. In Silicon Valley, successful founders routinely become the next generation’s investors. Once they’ve sold a company, many turn to venture capital and are eager to back the young hungry wolves they recognize as former versions of themselves. That reinforcing loop takes years to build, but it backs the ecosystem in a way few places can match.

Failure is part of the deal, not a disqualifier: investors here are more likely to back a founder who has failed once or twice, on the logic that failure taught them something and made them stronger the second time. People put serious money down knowing the outcome is binary: billionaire, or nothing. Building a modest, profitable business is never really the goal; it has to become the next unicorn. That’s the game you sign up for when you sign up to play the Silicon Valley game.

The city, once again, is on the rise, with record-breaking investment and IPOs, nearly unpayable rents, and a fresh wave of young talent arriving for the next Gold Rush. Which makes me wonder: who are the Cassandras of today? The ones warning this is just a bubble about to burst? The ones predicting our entire lives are about to be upended by AI? Who’s telling you the future right now and are you willing to listen?

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